One of the biggest government power grabs we’ve seen over the last year has largely flown under the radar: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s unilateral move at the start of the pandemic to largely prohibit evictions nationwide. You may have missed the news, but this unprecedented “eviction moratorium” just got extended by the Biden administration.
“The CDC has just announced that it is extending its nationwide eviction moratorium through June,” the National Review reports. “The original CDC eviction moratorium from September made it a crime — punishable by up to one year of imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000 — to evict certain tenants for nonpayment of rent.”
The constitutional and legal soundness of this nationwide dictate by unelected bureaucrats is, to put it mildly, highly dubious. (More on that here.) But as a nonlawyer, I’ll focus on the policy ramifications of this extreme overreach.
The CDC originally hoped to address a real potential problem. Millions of people have struggled to pay their rent throughout the pandemic because they are out of work due to lockdowns and restrictions. The government, understandably, did not want to see millions of people evicted from their homes.
The way it chose to respond, though, is simply bizarre.
By declaring evictions illegal, the government essentially made the collection of rent impossible. It’s as if the CDC ruled that anyone could go to a grocery store, fill up their cart, and walk out without paying. “No one is asking restaurants and grocery stores to give food out for free, so why are government agencies, with no authority to legislate, asking landlords to provide a service without compensation?” asked Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Ethan Blevins.
This has left millions of landlords — many of whom are working class or middle class — in a catastrophic mess. They can’t collect payments, so their property is occupied by nonpaying tenants in many cases. But there was never any moratorium on landlords’ mortgage payments!
“I had to basically bail out my own property because [my renters] knew they could just stay and not pay,” Reason Foundation policy analyst Jen Sidorova, herself a middle-class, small-scale landlord, told me in a podcast interview. “I have one tenant [out of four units] that is still paying.”
The feds basically seized people’s property without compensation and turned the rental market on its head. While the moratorium is in place, many landlords aren’t renting out their empty apartments because it’s too risky since they are unable to ensure collection of payment.
“For the two units I have vacant, I actually am not renting them out,” Sidorova said. “I think that’s another problem with the moratorium: Landlords are going to hold their units because there’s no way in [expletive] I can afford supporting other people.”
She explained that having no tenants is better than having unpaying tenants because she has to cover utilities. “It’s a better strategy for me to leave them empty.”
Meanwhile, whenever the eviction moratorium is finally allowed to lapse, renters who have used it will face mountains of enormous bills for unpaid rent — likely prompting calls for another massive taxpayer bailout. Who could have predicted it?
The CDC has created an enormous mess, a ticking time bomb that’s wreaking havoc now but will explode whenever it’s eventually allowed to expire. And it’s all for nothing.
There’s little reason to believe the eviction moratorium has slowed the spread of COVID-19, and renters facing eviction due to lost work would have received super-charged unemployment benefits anyway under current federal programs, more than enabling them to pay their rent. Regardless, the root source of the problem was government restrictions banning people from making a living. The government could have solved this entire issue long ago by letting people resume work.
Instead, the Biden administration is dodging the issue through June. Eventually, the bill on the CDC’s disastrous eviction moratorium is going to come due. And in the meantime, working-class landlords across the country will suffer the consequences.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a Washington Examiner contributor and host of the Breaking Boundaries podcast.
